NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage

In 1944, as Soviet Russia defended itself from Nazi invasion, Prokofiev wrote his Fifth Symphony as “a hymn to free and happy Man … his pure and noble spirit.” A few years later, an elderly Strauss composed his Four Last Songs, performed here by the legendary Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. Hear both of these pieces, along with music by Takemitsu that pays homage to Debussy.

TŌRU TAKEMITSU (1930–1996) Green

About the Composer

Tōru Takemitsu was one of the first Asian
composers to bring Eastern and Western music together on the concert stage.
(According to Seiji Ozawa, he was the first Japanese composer to write for an
international audience.) The interchange comes from both sides: Takemitsu was
influenced by Debussy, Messiaen, and Cage—Western composers who in turn were
profoundly impacted by Eastern music.

Takemitsu’s work is consistently
contemplative; it takes its time, refusing to be rushed by the demands of
tension, release, and development favored by Western music. It is all about
nuance, atmosphere, and the spiritual dimensions of physical sound.

About the Music

Green is an early work from
1967, the same year Takemitsu completed the piece that was his breakthrough
success, November Steps. According to the composer,
Green—sometimes called November Steps II—was written “from a wish
to enter into the secrets of Debussy’s music.” The shifting, muted colors do
sound vaguely Debussian—just as the dense, haunted wind chords toward the end
resemble Messiaen—but the sound world of Green is Takemitsu’s own and
could not be mistaken for anyone else’s.

Short, concentrated, and
rapturous, Green is an ideal introduction to Takemitsu’s music, moving
through the complex dissonance of the composer’s early period toward a forecast
of the serene “pantonal” late pieces. The pensive opening becomes increasingly
agitated as slithering strings blend with chiming vibraphones. Gradually,
celestial strings gather over pastoral winds, fragmented brass chorales, and
whispering basses, as the work fades toward a quiet bell.

RICHARD STRAUSS (1864–1949) Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs)

About the Composer

Like Delius’s Songs of Farewell,
Strauss’s Four Last Songs are the final creations of a composer who knew
he was at the end of his life, completing the farewell gesture by actually
dying. (Mahler, addicted to goodbyes, wrote more than one farewell to the world,
“tempting fate,” as his wife complained.) Strauss began the last song first,
basing it on the Eichendorff poem “At Sunset,” which depicts an elderly couple
seeing a sunset as a harbinger of death. Next, he set three Hesse poems that
also drew analogies between death and states of nature, then began a final Hesse
setting he did not live to complete. The myth that Strauss wrote these songs for
an idealized soprano has recently been debunked; he apparently composed them
specifically for the renowned Wagnerian singer Kirsten
Flagstad.

About the Music

The final standard-bearer for
Austro-German late Romanticism, Strauss is known for lush, formidable
orchestrations, but his final creations—Duet Concertino and Oboe Concerto, in
addition to these songs—are surpassingly intimate and delicate. For better or
for worse, they reflect none of the post-war troubles and traumas of the era,
including Strauss’s exile in Switzerland to escape the denazification program.
(For what it’s worth, he was cleared by the board.) They are also entirely
removed from the serialism, primitivism, expressionism, and other modernist
fashions of the century, though the concertos certainly partake of the
late-1940s vogue of neoclassicism.

A Closer
Listen

Knowing these songs are final testaments makes them uniquely
poignant, but without their dramatic circumstances they would still be among
Strauss’s most exquisite creations. Balancing serenity and melancholy with
precise equilibrium, they project none of the darkness and terror found in
near-death works like Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony or Verdi’s Te
Deum. Like Delius, who invokes late Whitman for his last songs, Strauss
faces death with equanimity, with neither bitterness nor soothing thoughts of an
afterlife.

The scoring is transparent and crystalline even though it
offers Strauss’s customary cushions of sensuality. The opening “Spring” features
trembling high strings “drenched in light.” In “September,” a horn gently
plummets, “yearning for repose.” In “Going to Sleep,” a solo violin ushers the
“unfettered soul” into “night’s magic sphere.” Strauss’s final “At Sunset,” with
its soaring soprano line and trilling skylarks, floats toward an orchestral
quotation from Strauss’s 1889 tone poem Death and Transfiguration, the
“deliverance from the world” forecast in that visionary work finally attained.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953) Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op. 100

About the Composer

Like Strauss, Prokofiev has taken considerable
heat in some quarters for his nonresistance to his country’s murderous
regime—and like Strauss, his popularity soars on, undaunted by ideological
disputes that have continued long after the collapse of Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union.

Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony is the most programmed of the
composer’s seven symphonies, outpacing even charmers like the First and Seventh,
and the blockbuster Mussorgsky-like Third. Curious explanations have been
offered for this success, often by commentators hostile to the work. Some argue
that the Fifth is Prokofiev’s first “real” symphony and has thus been lavished
with special attention: the “Classical” Symphony No. 1, after all, is an
18th-century pastiche, and the Third and Fourth aren’t proper symphonies because
they are based on material from Prokofiev’s stage works. (The Second doesn’t
count at all because Prokofiev planned to revise it and never did.) But Haydn
and Mozart wrote numerous works based on recycled material and gestures from
earlier musical eras. Besides, the public couldn’t care less about whether a
work follows musicologists’ rules for a proper symphony.

It is also
claimed that the success of the Fifth has to do with its inspirational wartime
scenario: The symphony was written in 1944, with victory over the Nazis clearly
in sight, and with much fanfare from the composer (who conducted the Moscow
premiere) about the work being representative of “a hymn to free and happy Man,
to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit.”

But that was more than
60 years ago, and the work continues to hold its own, not only as Prokofiev’s
most beloved symphony, but also as one of the most frequently played and
recorded of all modern symphonies. Furthermore, only the first movement, with
its heroic opening theme and thunderous coda, really carries the weight of a
wartime program; with its delicate harmonies and playful woodwind tunes, this
work does not have the darkness and violence of programmatic war symphonies such
as Shostakovich’s Fifth, Seventh, and Eighth (symphonies that have inspired many
shrill academic disputes over ideological “subtexts”).

A Closer
Listen

Prokofiev’s Fifth is a hit for the same reason most warhorses
are: It has memorable tunes, solid construction, vivid orchestration, and high
emotional impact—the same qualities present in Romeo and Juliet,
Prokofiev’s most popular ballet score. Indeed, the symphony’s passionate Adagio
movement bears more than a passing resemblance to the balcony scene in that work
(especially the enchanting harp glissandos near the end of the movement), and
the Allegro marcato and Allegro giocoso finale have a ballet-like spring and
litheness. Prokofiev’s fondness for spine-tingling brass and percussion effects,
so prominent in the fight scenes in Romeo and Juliet, erupt full force at
the end of the symphony’s first and fourth movements.

The lyrical
quality of the Fifth is characteristic of Prokofiev’s late style, especially the
grand melodies in the first and third movements, some of the most lavishly
expansive he ever wrote. Still, touches of Prokofiev’s earlier diablerie and
sarcasm infect the carnival-like woodwind tunes in the second and fourth
movements. The neoclassicism of the First Symphony is recalled as well in the
18th-century layout: a clearly delineated sonata-form first movement, a rustic
scherzo, a hymn-like slow movement, and an exuberant finale introduced with a
pastoral reminiscence of earlier material. There is even a dramatic
re-invocation of Prokofiev’s early modernist period in the shuddery, dissonant
outburst in the climax of the Adagio.

Here then is a Prokofiev symphony
with everything, an aesthetic summing-up as well as a work of the moment
impelled by good news from the battlefront. Given the work’s supreme confidence
and power, it is not surprising that it was dashed off in less than a month.